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it's sometimes very helpful to think of filesystems as a streamable blob store with a hierarchical key
by inopinatus 5y ago
it's sometimes very helpful to think of filesystems as a streamable blob store with a hierarchical key
- eru 5y agoThat's one valid perspective. But don't forget that you can also seek and mmap etc. And hard-links are a thing, too. Things like fuse also show that it's easy to view other databases as filesystems, too. As a silly example, you can 'explode' /etc/passwd into individual files per entry. Or you could expose even a relational database as a filesystem. For the latter, you could do something simple and expose tables as directories and rows as files. Or you could do something dynamic, and eg represent (read-only or idempotent) queries as file-names, and their results as file contents. That wouldn't be so much a traditional filesystem, but would be accessible via a filesystem interface.
- tharkun__ 5y agoI hear AWS DynamoDB is basically just a "key value store interface" to S3 file storage.